(Continuedfrom page 23) icebreakers. The
ship was working out of Resolute in Canada's
Arctic islands, escorting supply vessels to and
from weather stations and other sites along
the Northwest Passage.
Captain Toomey invited me to the bridge
of Pierre Radisson during the run across Bar
row Strait. As we crunched our way effort
lessly through the closely packed ice floes, he
told me a bit about escort duty.
"Of course, the heavier the ice," he said,
"the closer you have to keep the ships behind
you." He swept a hand in front of us. "This
kind of stuff is nothing, but when you get into
dense, thick ice that's several years old and
you hit a big piece, it gets violent-feels like
you've run aground at high speed.
"Then you have to look behind as well as
ahead, because the real danger's that the ship
astern won't be able to stop in time and will
ram you." He smiled grimly. "In this busi
ness you look over your shoulder a lot."
welcomes the presence of ice
breakers. I talked one day with an
old friend, George Porter, an
esteemed Inuit leader of the community of
Gjoa Haven on King William Island in the
central part of the passage. The village takes
its name from Amundsen's sloop, which
anchored there from 1903 to 1905.
George Porter's grandfather was a Yankee
whaling captain who wintered many times at
Herschel Island, and his father was both a fur
trader and an Arctic seaman. I told George of
my experience aboard PierreRadisson, and
his face turned grave.
"You know, John," he said, "for Inuit
people the land and the water are the same
thing-here the sea is frozen over most of the
year. So to us, driving a ship through the ice
is like driving a bulldozer across a field with
the blade down.
"A few years ago," he added, "a group of
hunters from Arctic Bay to the north of here
were out on the ice miles from home hunting
seals. Without knowing they were there, a
Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker cut a lane
between them and the village. They were
stranded for several days until the ice closed
up again. If it hadn't, those men could
have died."
What many native peoples fear most along
the Northwest Passage today is the growing
Traditions can't compete with modern tempta
tions in the heart of a child. Boys with a
boombox play it cool at Inuvik's airport, while
Victoria Island schoolgirls (above) eat snack
food for lunch. Outside influences that have
transformed Arctic life in little more than a
generation put an added burden on young
parents like Albert and Vera Ehaloak (top).
level of pollution. To them an oil spill such as
the one caused by Exxon Valdez is not just an
environmental disaster but a threat to life
itself. Although oil has brought increased
income and other material benefits, some like
Luke Koonook consider the cost to be danger
ously high.
A respected Eskimo leader in his village
of Point Hope, Alaska, near the western
entrance of the Northwest Passage, Luke is
captain of an eight-man whaling crew that
hunts bowhead whales each spring, when the
great creatures come north to feed in the east
ern Beaufort Sea.
Point Hope has 19 such crews, and they
Northwest Passage